Beyond the frontiers of the Akasava, and separated from all the other Territories by a curious bush belt which ran almost in a straight line for seventy miles, were the people of Morjaba. They were a folk isolated from territorial life, and Sanders saw them once every year and no more frequently, for they were difficult to come by, regular payers of taxes and law-abiding, having quarrels with none. The bush (reputedly the abode of ghosts) was, save at one point, impenetrable. Nature had plaited a natural wall on one side, and had given the tribe the protection of high mountains to the north and a broad swamp to the west. The fierce storms of passion and hate which burst upon the river at intervals and sent thousands of spears to a blooding, were scarcely echoed in this sanctuary-land. The marauders of the Great King's country to the north never fetched across the smooth moraine of the mountains, and the evil people of The-Land-beyond-the-Swamp were held back by the treacherous bogland wherein, _cala-cala_, a whole army had been swallowed up. Thus protected, the Morjabian folk grew fat and rich. The land was a veritable treasure of Nature, and it is a fact that in the dialect they speak, there is no word which means "hunger."[5] [Footnote 5: It is as curious a fact that amongst the majority of cannibal people there is no equivalent for "thank you."--E. W.] Yet the people of the Morjaba were not without their crises. S'kobi, the stout chief, held a great court which was attended by ten thousand people, for at that court was to be concluded for ever the feud between the M'gimi and the M'joro--a feud which went back for the greater part of fifty years. The M'gimi were the traditional warrior tribe, the bearers of arms, and, as their name ("The High Lookers") implied, the proudest and most exclusive of the people. For every man was the descendant of a chief, and it was "easier for fish to walk," as the saying goes, than for a man of the M'joro ("The Diggers") to secure admission to the caste. Three lateral cuts on either cheek was the mark of the M'gimi--wounds made, upon the warrior's initiation to the order, with the razor-edged blade of a killing-spear. They lived apart in three camps to the number of six thousand men, and for five years from the hour of their initiation they neither married nor courted. The M'gimi turned their backs to women, and did not suffer their presence in their camps. And if any man departed from this austere rule he was taken to the Breaking Tree, his four limbs were fractured, and he was hoisted to the lower branches, between which a litter was swung, and his regiment sat beneath the tree neither eating, drinking nor sleeping until he died. Sometimes this was a matter of days. As for the woman who had tempted his eye and his tongue, she was a witness.